Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Anonymous Versus Scientology: The First Stand Alone Complex?

I know that title can look a bit intimidating to the uninitiated. What is a Stand Alone Complex? Who are Anonymous? What does any of that have to do with L. Ron Hubbard?

Anonymous is a much more esoteric subject, I think, so we'll start with the more imposing but perhaps easier to grasp "Stand Alone Complex."

The Stand Alone Complex is a pretty interesting philosophical proposition which is the heart of the first season of the Ghost in the Shell TV series (of the same subtitle.) The deliciously cyberpunkGhost in the Shell movie is worth noting here as it is thematically very different from the TV series and the movie was directed by Mamoru Oshii while Kenji Kamiyama handled the series. The movie was also was released way back in 1995, really at the beginning of the internet curve, while the TV series' first season premiered in Japan in late 2006. I'll come back to that in a moment.

A Stand Alone Complex is the eventual (perhaps inevitable) result of individuals accessing an information medium like the internet. To over-simplify, collective information being viewed by a sufficient array of individuals creates collective action. But where it gets even stranger is that the acting collective is made up of Stand Alone individuals with differing motives, ideologies, and methodologies.

I'm tempted to call it a sort of twenty-first century mob-mentality, but that conjures up images that are really the opposite of the complex's most interesting characteristics. What makes a Stand Alone Complex such an intriguing idea is that it proposes large numbers of people accomplishing action with widely differing strata in their personal make-up. Whereas a mob implies a single determined group of united individuals, the individuals therein also lose their individuality to the mob. A Stand Alone Complex maintains each member's individuality, partially at least because of the unique properties of the information medium through which they gathered. In this way, "unrelated, yet very similar, actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort."

Conversely, a Stand Alone Complex also relies upon a human willingness for copycat behavior, which also means that one could think of none of the individuals as being truly separate entities in their self-mimicking behavior, thus not individual at all. Rather they copy the so-called original, creating a mass-movement out their similar interest in one individual or one event.

While this may sound like a far-fetched concept, the reality is that copycat behavior, which is a mainstay of this phenomenon, has been around for far longer than the internet. Serial murderers have often been diagnosed with a sort of copycatting that's not entirely unlike a Stand Alone Complex. But information collectives like the internet create a way of uniting much more disparate groups of people than the the sociopathic or psychotic. And the boundary-less nature of that can be exploited to profound effect.

Kenji Kamiyama, the director of the TV series admits in a fascinating interview to his own copycatting of Mamoru Oshii's previous work in his own directorial start. Kamiyama describes himself as "full of conceit" in believing he could substitute his work for Oshii's without anyone knowing the difference.

This is actually sort of shares an odd connection to the thrust of the series' first season, which deals primarily with a hacker known as the "Laughing Man," a revolutionary avatar who's image slowly transforms as it is claimed in copycat perpetrations by others using him as a stand-in for their own schemes. At one point it is even suggested that the original may have never existed, that only "copies of copies" make up the whole of the Stand Alone Complex.

As much as all of that may sound like one Japanese man's willy-nilly thought experiment, a strange candidate for perhaps the first known Stand Alone Complex has emerged in the form of, surprise surprise, a hacker collective of sorts.

The first time I spotted that video, there was something both creepy and rousing about watching it unfold. The heartless monotone of the computer's voice. The high-minded musings on the nature of information, freedom, religion, and so forth. And the grim, very threatening sounding intentions to stop Scientology in its tracks.

And as hollow as any of it might have sounded, the results have been anything but.

But who are our strange revolutionaries? Is it even appropriate to call them such? Well that's where the story gets even stranger.

You may have already gathered from the images in the previous links that they all appear to be wearing the same mask. That's no coincidence. It comes from Alan Moore's award-winning V for Vendetta graphic novel which, was recently reintroduced into the pop-culture psyche with a movie done by the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix trilogy fame.) The movie's penultimate scene depicts thousands of angry Londoners gathered around parliament, all wearing the same unnerving mask, in protest; the similarity is not coincidental.

As it happens, the mask-wearing V, the anti-hero of Moore's tale, does bear a strange resemblance to Ghost in the Shell's Laughing Man, whose own calling card is a smiling face worn as an animating glyph to conceal his face. Pop-culture truly is a snake eating its own tail.

As for Anonymous, they are a complicated subject. The Church of Scientology has labeled them "cyber-terrorists" (another term used to describe the Laughing Man) bent on promoting "religious persecution." Anonymous has countered somewhat under the banner of "Knowledge Must Be Free" as a criticism of the church's method of charging its devotees in order to participate. This also fits in nicely with their other activities, of which internet piracy and attacks on individual's privacy feature regularly.

Yet, what seems to have begun as one big inside joke has slowly gestated and morphed itself into an internet activist collective. Their attack on Scientology is rallied around an information resource they started specifically for fellow protesters/hackers, Project Chanology, a brewing ground open for any to participate, write, and edit as they see fit in proposing new actions to be taken against the church.

Given the church's infamously litigious nature, it seems inevitable that an eventual challenger to its ideology would come in the form of a faceless mass that readily identifies itself as "Legion" in its own addresses. After all, the anonymity of the internet, or even more simply a mask, does render one somewhat invincible to a lawsuit.

Who do you sue when Anonymous is your provocateur?

Legal recourse necessitates the identification of the culprit. But if the culprit has become a shifting, evolving, fluctuating mass of thousands, how can you accuse it? Or better yet, what do you stand to gain when tracking and confronting individuals from a cellular opponent? The RIAA is already failing in its efforts to stymie piracy of music over the internet. It has shown that taking legal action against an army of like-minded individuals is an exhausting, often hard-won battle. And attrition gives the individuals infinitely more favor for victory in the long run, even in the face of short-term consequences. The growth of the internet as a medium for this kind of collectivist behavior may ultimately come to overpower more than a few corporate entities in the coming decades.

I'm not sure if Kenji Kamiyama is aware of the phenomenon, although given its recent coverage in several international news sites, I'm inclined to believe he does. But I wonder what he makes of it. The Stand Alone Complex he presents is one united against corporate corruption on the highest levels, something of an allegory to the current health care situation America faces today. It certainly has none of the confusing connotations or questions about freedom of religion that come into play in the current situation.

Or perhaps the real question is will Anonymous succeed and if so who is next? Diebold? Homeland Security? The Federal Government itself? There are quite a few interesting choices that come to mind, ones I could easily see uniting disparate individuals into a force to be reckoned with. I think there is a strange analogue to democracy lurking somewhere under all of this: the power of free and informed people to stand up against perceived injustice in the world. Though I'm not inclined to think that it's the kind of democracy neoconservatives are happy with inflicting upon unsuspecting third-world nations. Anonymous seems of a character more belonging to the 60's, a kind of public that will not be gladly coerced by propaganda or corralled by fear quite so easily. And that, for whatever else can be said about the Stand Alone Complex, seems to me a very good thing.